"A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’" Still thinking on this article a bit. It touches on lots of things I have issues with – the startup scene, and in particular the US startup scene, and the usefulness of what it makes; wrestling with the idea that making IS value, something I do a lot; having watched recent Bret Victor videos, what something meaningful would work like. But also: it reminds me why I've chosen some of the work I have recently, that values are something you reassess and fight for, that value isn't just curing cancer or better pill bottles, but also charm and joy and wit and provocation and art. (It's probably not another niche dating service).

"Here we get a glimpse of an alternative figuration of data itself. Rather than some kind of precious (but immaterial) stuff, or fuel for market speculation, data here is a relationship, a link between one part of the world with another, and a trace that can be endlessly reshaped."

"As I understand it, B says, the cliche “writer’s block” actually describes the inability to write anything at all. If you have a problem with a plot, she says, you’re not blocked, you are in fact writing; because the maddeningly slow solution of difficult problems in the context of specific pieces of work is part of the process of writing. In B’s opinion, you aren’t blocked in the cliche sense unless you’ve written nothing for several years and can be played by Mickey Rourke." Yes, that.

"The OWL is an open source, open hardware, reprogrammable effects pedal designed for musicians, coders, and hackers." Ie: a DSP stompbox with an ARM Cortex in it; you reprogram it by writing C++ and uploading new patches over USB.